Mars Rover Technology Yields Mega-Photo of Obama Inauguration

This is a small version of a massive Gigapan photo of U.S. President Barack Obama's Inauguration on Jan. 20, 2008 was taken by photographer David Bergman.

Credit: David Bergman via NASA.

Millions of
Americans used their personal cameras to snap photos of U.S. President Barack
Obama?s inauguration last month, but one photographer borrowed a
lesson from NASA?s Mars rovers to record the moment.

Photographer
David Bergman used the same technology behind the panoramic vision of NASA?s Spirit
and Opportunity rovers on Mars to capture a massive panoramic photo of
President Obama?s inauguration on Jan. 20.

The ultra
high-resolution picture is a stunning 1,474 megapixel panorama. Most ordinary
digital photographs contain less than 10 megapixels.

"Covering the
inauguration of President Obama was one of the biggest thrills of my
life," said Bergman. "Little did I know that it would be topped by
the reaction to a photo I made that day. ?With the ability to zoom in and move
around the photo, it turned into an international game of 'Where's Waldo?' In
the first 5 days, the image was viewed by millions of people in 186
countries."

To capture the image, Bergman
used a camera system called Gigapan, which evolved from the mast-mounted
Panoramic Camera (Pancam) system developed by NASA?s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
and Cornell University to give the rovers Spirit and Opportunity their
high-resolution vision.

Each of the rover?s Pancam systems
can tilt 180 degrees and rotate 360 degrees, which allows Spirit and
Opportunity snap photos in all directions. The individual 1-megapixel digital
images are then stitched together using computer software to create a high-resolution
panorama that smoothes out anomalies.

On
Spirit and Opportunity, the Pancam system sits atop a mast at about the
eye-level of a human and yields high-resolution images that allow scientists to
zoom in on rocks or other Martian topics of interest. The rovers have used
their camera eyes for more than five years and continue to explore the Martian
surface at their respective landing sites on opposite sides of Mars.

Gigapan was designed by Randy
Sargent at NASA's Ames Research Center and Illah Nourbakhsh at Carnegie Mellon
University, who were inspired by the Pancam system?s success on Mars and wanted
to apply the technology on Earth. Sargent worked with Rich LeGrand of Charmed
Labs LLC to design and produce the Gigapan products.

For Bergman?s inauguration
photo, 220 individual photographs were combined into a single image. The
process took about 15 minutes to capture all of the photographic pieces.

"I'm really a
traditional, still photographer," Bergman said. "I had seen the
Gigapan system but never used it. Up until the day of the inauguration, I had
no idea how to set it up. I fiddled around with it for a while in the hotel
room to figure it out. That's a testament to how easy it is to use."

Getting through the
Inauguration Day security was the biggest challenge, he added.

"I had to be there at
6:00 in the morning and had to pass through three capitol police security
checkpoints. I didn't have to face any Martian dust storms like the rovers do,
but it was bitterly cold, and the ceremony didn't start until 11:30 a.m. I had
no room for a tripod, so I had to clamp the Gigapan assembly to a rail and hope
it worked."

Gigapan has been used for
more than President Obama?s inauguration. Relief workers have used
Gigapan-generated overlays on Google Earth to pinpoint areas in the most
distress after natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina and the 2005
Kashmir Earthquake, while other scientists employed it to document Earth?s
cultures and ecosystems, NASA officials said.

Click here to see Bergman?s
ultra high-resolution Inauguration Day image.